Editing Your Video

Since you’re being swept along with our video-oriented culture, you probably have a smartphone with a video camera recorder. After you’ve grown tired of taking videos of the cats sleeping with their heads resting on one another and your grandchildren standing in awe of the festivus holiday tree, you want to expand. You get a Flip camcorder and start recording in High Definition. You start using it at work to record your bosses speeches. You get testimonies from grateful clients, telling how they’ve benefitted from your firm’s services. As soon as you start putting your videos up on a streaming service like You Tube or Vimeo, you start to lust after a $2-4,000 video recorder and you seriously consider mortgaging your home, selling your car, and hoping to get an attorney who will work pro-bono on your divorce. There are limits.

Before you start to make Steven Spielberg nervous, you have to edit your videos to make them better. Titles. Transitions. Fades. Sound consistency.

Enter TechSmith’s Camtasia. Lots less expensive that Adobie’s Premier and easier to learn.

Here’s a PowerPoint slide show produced for Homeland Security, documenting how one hacker was caught approaching Eric Mower Associates advertising agency and ultimately causing serious change in that firm. The slide show was turned into a video by Camtasia with little effort in less than 5 minutes.